only briefly appears in the Ringworld series, and then only to nudge the plot along. It plays very very little role in Children. Good thing too, because he tried to make it play too much of a role in Throne.
He has one other short story using the gene. It's the "future-most" of the Known Space series, set centuries after the Ringworld quartet. The lucky humans have learned about the manipulation, and how to make use of this uncontrollable unpredictable power.[*] It's an amusing story, but not up to Niven par.
He said it would be the last story focusing on the gene, because it creates characters more powerful than the author. Likewise, while the Pak are some of his most interesting and popular creations ever, it's incredibly hard to write good stories when the characters are more intelligent than the author or the readers.
[*] For those new to the books: just because you're lucky doesn't mean you have any say over what the luck does to you or those around you. Say, you break your arm in a three-car wreck, and while you're in the hospital, you meet your future spouse. Lucky for you overall, not necessarily so much for others.
I wondered if I was the only one who thought of that book when reading about the F-ring. Just finished re-reading it a couple weeks ago, too. Now I need to find that list of which characters in the book are supposed to be which sci-fi authors in real life...
Give them a two weeks notice and use that two weeks to start taking the comments out of your code!
Just because you no longer work there doesn't mean you're immune from lawsuits.
$ cvs up -D "a fortnight ago"
$ cvs ci -m "Undo Bob's lameass attempt at sabotage"
$ Mail -s "need to initiate legal action" headlawyer
yah, it was Bob, all fixed now
^D
And yes, "a fortnight ago" is a valid CVS time specification. (Probably grew out of people trying to follow that kind of advice... *grin*)
For as much as modern pundits seem to throw around the term "treason" these days, I'm surprised the term hasn't been applied to Diebold.
Treason only applies to government and military. (And plain ol' citizens in certain contexts.) Not corporations. So any labels of treason would have to be applied to the officials of the State of California, not the appointed executives of Diebold. Even modern pundits know this, so they won't go there.
(On the other hand, in this country, Corporations Are People Too!, so you might have a good run at trying to apply it.)
I'll also mention this little gem by Harrington:
Treason never prospers,
what's the reason?
For if it doth prosper,
none dare call it treason.
Stick it in a hole, but also build...
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
...some big scary hills and signs intended to outlast the current civilization and language on top of the holes.
("Frequently"? They always forge the sender. Anyhow...)
I really like qmail, but it does make the braindead design of accepting mail, then processing it. (For reasons of efficiency or something; it's supposed to be a feature.)
The folks at LinuxMagic make a replacement that's a bitch to get working, but does all kinds of checking during the SMTP transaction, like valid user checking, virus scanning, etc. You're supposed to be able to plug in arbitrary checkers, but I never got around to trying. The valid-user checking alone is worth it. (They have a funny logo, too.)
for the abysmally named 'System of Systems Common Operating Environment,'
Look, you can either take whatever acronyms they hand out, or suffer under "backronyms" like PROTECT and PATRIOT. They don't know how to do anything else.
Which is what we used to call pretty-printers when they did more than just wrap everything in font tags.
My favorite was lgrind, which produced TeX/LaTeX versions of your source. It could be taught about variable naming patterns, so if your code does something like "delta_vn = blah", it would emit "\delta_{vn} = blah". When printed, this becomes an actual Greek delta character, with the "vn" as a subscript. (Just one example.)
Checking the formula in the code against the formula in the math reference is a lot easier when the formula in the code looks like the math.:-)
Same girl dies of a brain aneurism ("wow, died in mid-backstroke") in both films; characters find out about it around act two in both movies.
Smith actually intended for the three films to all be connected through the same person, but I forget where that person comes into play during Chasing Amy.
and you're not going to get the answer on slashdot, or even the web. Find some books. Even then you won't get consensus among Christianity.
Even in a Christian Bible, the figure of the devil changes from one end of the story to the other. He rarely makes appearances in the Old Testament, as you said. Even in the story of Job, the figure there is more of a prosecuting attorney -- no, seriously -- than evil incarnate.
As the concept of a Hell became more solidly defined (from hell as being "separation from God" to "a big pit with fire and darkness and country music"), so did the concept of its most important inhabitant (although whether he's the boss, or the chief prisoner, depends on who you talk to).
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a short novel, Inferno, in which a sci-fi author dies, goes to hell, and finds out it's exactly like Dante described it.:-) The character keeps trying to find an explanation -- any explanation -- other than "take it at face value." It's a fun book, but the part at the end where he decides he's finally found a good reason for Hell's existence is (while not a new thought) fascinating.
Some freaked-out parent is trying to get this book (and its sequel) removed from the library in the public high school I attended.
I thought it was a powerful book. A little offensive in places, but the correct answer to that is, "okay, so your kid can read something else; this isn't required reading."
(Wow, I loved "Bridge to Terabithia". Tell me they haven't tried to ban that one too.)
What will they ban next? "The Phantom Tollbooth" because it makes kids think that dogs have clocks embedded in them?
Freakishly enough, there was a copy of it in my public high school library. (When they don't rearrange the shelves every so often, stuff just accumulates for decades.) I found it because I worked in the library during the study hall period. One of my jobs was updating the catalog. I would have been about 16.
(This was the card catalog, by the way. They used paper then. We were old school. Er, old skool. Anyhow.)
Went to an assistant librarian. Me: "Says this was written by Hitler. Was it the same Hitler?" AL: "Yep. Didn't know we had a copy of that." Me: "It was buried in dust. Nobody's ever checked it out. *pause* Wait. He wrote a book?" AL: "Yep. While in prison. It's universally considered complete crap for obvious reasons, I don't know why we have a copy when we're short on shelf space."
Me: "I'm going to try and read it."
AL: *raises eyebrow sternly* "Why?"
Me: "To find out what a racist murdering dictator thinks like. 'Know your enemy' and all that."
She knew I had a level head on my shoulders, so she let me. I gave up after about 50 pages. Rambling incoherent babble, lemme tell ya. My grammar teacher would have flunked the bastard for run-on sentences alone. Dubya is a master of eloquence compared to this book.
It's a few hundred pages longer; presumably the anti-Semitic crap starts up later.
...as the completely consequences-free environment known as Hogwart's.
I live in a fairly conservative area. Many, many families I know are strict Christians (Protestant, Catholic, across the board), and the ones that have read Harry Potter nearly all love it.
Once you actually read the books, it becomes fairly clear that the magic is just there as a gimmick. The author needed a British public school setting, but that's been done to death, so she made one with a slightly different curriculum.
The "nearly" part above... a number of people were bothered, not by the "witchcraft" but by the fact that in the first couple of books, Harry can do no wrong. Rules are bent or overlooked, everything is forgiven or ignored once it's all over, he makes bad decisions and doesn't discover -- via consequences, like the rest of us did -- that they were bad.
The later books definitely change that (people get injured, killed, etc, as a result of Harry's screwups).
One of my oldest.sigs is copied from one of the most senior denizens from the Scary Devil Monastery. (I was a member long ago, then I finally, well, recovered.)
I have seen things you lusers would not believe. I've seen Sun monitors on
fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the
dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the
root partition last week. Time to die...
- Peter Gutmann, a.s.r.
(It's a cool sig, so if you use it, give proper attribution, eh, ya plagarizing fucks? Gutmann is someone you don't wanna upset.)
Yes, it was real, and yes, that's pretty muvh how it worked. Several lamps being viewed by a camera, and the image data was broken down to use as random numbers. You could even click a button to request a kilobyte or so of random digits.
It was hosted for a while at SGI's "personal pages for employees" server, which was decomissioned after it became obvious that the projects people worked on in their spare time were way cooler than anything SGI was officially offering that year. The Lavarand webpages were moved around a little, but may have vanished by now.
KDE 3.3 has been in Debian unstable for over a week now. Unfortunately, it's been broken and uninstallable from the beginning, without even acknowledgement from the maintainer.
Just because I love Debian doesn't mean they don't also disgust me.:-)
Are there any other KDE-related debs in experimental?
Yes, that's a really cool idea, but that function key had better be bright red, with a little plastic mollyguard over it, locked. And it should take two people standing fifteen feet apart turning a pair of keys at the same time to unlock it.
I mean, Tab and Esc are right next to each other on the keyboard I use, and I occasionally insert tabs when I wanted to go back to command mode in vi. Can't imagine the fun I'd have if I meant to hit ~ and accidentally hit "reboot this machine and install linux immediately" instead.
No it wasn't. Java was designed for one thing: to make money for Sun Microsystems. Everything else is secondary.
Yes, it's a good language. Not particularly innovative, but it has a nice clean design. It started out with a good-sized standard library, which has now become so huge as to be unlearnable. 8 points out of 10.
But it's also the only programming language in CS history to come with a corporately-chosen marketing slogan ("write once, run [never the same way on any two platforms] everywhere"). That's a bad bad sign, and you seem to have fallen for the hype. You're smarter than that.
No, it's not all hype. Yes, it's a fine language. No, it wasn't designed to be easy to learn.
...in which Dernhelm yanks off his helmet to revreal that "he" is actually Eowyn, who then delivers her not-a-man line and ruins the Witch-King's whole day with a sharp pointy thing.
The setup is even more prominent in the books. The race is referred to as "Men" (capital M) as an all-inclusive term. When the Witch-King laid the smack down on Arnor and rode off, an Elf prophesied that "far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man shall he fall."
I believe it's even printed with a small 'm'. Could be wrong.
In any case, everyone standing by heard it to mean that it would be an Elf or Dwarf or Other[tm] who would eventually kill him, when it actually turned out to be a very brave woman and a Hobbit.
(The Hobbit kinda cheated by using a dagger which had been specifically enchanted against the Witch-King, but the movie skips that.)
First, there's a constant tuning of both preditor and prey
Absolutely. Unfortunately, as most predator-prey models will tell you, neither population ever goes to zero unless something catastrophic happens. And in this case, catastrophe is precisely what we want to happen to the prey.
(If they'd simply implement my proposed scheme of a bullet to the head of every spammer, no mercy, no appeal, it'd be easy. But noooo, "spammers are human beings no matter how useless and harmful they are," waaaaah.)
there are occasional discreet major developments
Um. "Discrete" is the word you want. Spammers are anything but discreet.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
only briefly appears in the Ringworld series, and then only to nudge the plot along. It plays very very little role in Children. Good thing too, because he tried to make it play too much of a role in Throne.
He has one other short story using the gene. It's the "future-most" of the Known Space series, set centuries after the Ringworld quartet. The lucky humans have learned about the manipulation, and how to make use of this uncontrollable unpredictable power.[*] It's an amusing story, but not up to Niven par.
He said it would be the last story focusing on the gene, because it creates characters more powerful than the author. Likewise, while the Pak are some of his most interesting and popular creations ever, it's incredibly hard to write good stories when the characters are more intelligent than the author or the readers.
[*] For those new to the books: just because you're lucky doesn't mean you have any say over what the luck does to you or those around you. Say, you break your arm in a three-car wreck, and while you're in the hospital, you meet your future spouse. Lucky for you overall, not necessarily so much for others.
I wondered if I was the only one who thought of that book when reading about the F-ring. Just finished re-reading it a couple weeks ago, too. Now I need to find that list of which characters in the book are supposed to be which sci-fi authors in real life...
...Luna.
Then /everything/ goes by a name, and "moon" is reserved for satellites which obey certain principles (I don't remember what they are).
Just because you no longer work there doesn't mean you're immune from lawsuits.
And yes, "a fortnight ago" is a valid CVS time specification. (Probably grew out of people trying to follow that kind of advice... *grin*)
Treason only applies to government and military. (And plain ol' citizens in certain contexts.) Not corporations. So any labels of treason would have to be applied to the officials of the State of California, not the appointed executives of Diebold. Even modern pundits know this, so they won't go there.
(On the other hand, in this country, Corporations Are People Too!, so you might have a good run at trying to apply it.)
I'll also mention this little gem by Harrington:
...some big scary hills and signs intended to outlast the current civilization and language on top of the holes.
Yeah, it's a little weird.
("Frequently"? They always forge the sender. Anyhow...)
I really like qmail, but it does make the braindead design of accepting mail, then processing it. (For reasons of efficiency or something; it's supposed to be a feature.)
The folks at LinuxMagic make a replacement that's a bitch to get working, but does all kinds of checking during the SMTP transaction, like valid user checking, virus scanning, etc. You're supposed to be able to plug in arbitrary checkers, but I never got around to trying. The valid-user checking alone is worth it. (They have a funny logo, too.)
Green when the previously nightly build went okay, red when it crashed, etc...
Look, you can either take whatever acronyms they hand out, or suffer under "backronyms" like PROTECT and PATRIOT. They don't know how to do anything else.
Which is what we used to call pretty-printers when they did more than just wrap everything in font tags.
My favorite was lgrind, which produced TeX/LaTeX versions of your source. It could be taught about variable naming patterns, so if your code does something like "delta_vn = blah", it would emit "\delta_{vn} = blah". When printed, this becomes an actual Greek delta character, with the "vn" as a subscript. (Just one example.)
Checking the formula in the code against the formula in the math reference is a lot easier when the formula in the code looks like the math. :-)
Same girl dies of a brain aneurism ("wow, died in mid-backstroke") in both films; characters find out about it around act two in both movies.
Smith actually intended for the three films to all be connected through the same person, but I forget where that person comes into play during Chasing Amy.
and you're not going to get the answer on slashdot, or even the web. Find some books. Even then you won't get consensus among Christianity.
Even in a Christian Bible, the figure of the devil changes from one end of the story to the other. He rarely makes appearances in the Old Testament, as you said. Even in the story of Job, the figure there is more of a prosecuting attorney -- no, seriously -- than evil incarnate.
As the concept of a Hell became more solidly defined (from hell as being "separation from God" to "a big pit with fire and darkness and country music"), so did the concept of its most important inhabitant (although whether he's the boss, or the chief prisoner, depends on who you talk to).
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a short novel, Inferno, in which a sci-fi author dies, goes to hell, and finds out it's exactly like Dante described it. :-) The character keeps trying to find an explanation -- any explanation -- other than "take it at face value." It's a fun book, but the part at the end where he decides he's finally found a good reason for Hell's existence is (while not a new thought) fascinating.
Some freaked-out parent is trying to get this book (and its sequel) removed from the library in the public high school I attended.
I thought it was a powerful book. A little offensive in places, but the correct answer to that is, "okay, so your kid can read something else; this isn't required reading."
(Wow, I loved "Bridge to Terabithia". Tell me they haven't tried to ban that one too.)
What will they ban next? "The Phantom Tollbooth" because it makes kids think that dogs have clocks embedded in them?
Freakishly enough, there was a copy of it in my public high school library. (When they don't rearrange the shelves every so often, stuff just accumulates for decades.) I found it because I worked in the library during the study hall period. One of my jobs was updating the catalog. I would have been about 16.
(This was the card catalog, by the way. They used paper then. We were old school. Er, old skool. Anyhow.)
Went to an assistant librarian. Me: "Says this was written by Hitler. Was it the same Hitler?" AL: "Yep. Didn't know we had a copy of that." Me: "It was buried in dust. Nobody's ever checked it out. *pause* Wait. He wrote a book?" AL: "Yep. While in prison. It's universally considered complete crap for obvious reasons, I don't know why we have a copy when we're short on shelf space."
Me: "I'm going to try and read it."
AL: *raises eyebrow sternly* "Why?"
Me: "To find out what a racist murdering dictator thinks like. 'Know your enemy' and all that."
She knew I had a level head on my shoulders, so she let me. I gave up after about 50 pages. Rambling incoherent babble, lemme tell ya. My grammar teacher would have flunked the bastard for run-on sentences alone. Dubya is a master of eloquence compared to this book.
It's a few hundred pages longer; presumably the anti-Semitic crap starts up later.
...as the completely consequences-free environment known as Hogwart's.
I live in a fairly conservative area. Many, many families I know are strict Christians (Protestant, Catholic, across the board), and the ones that have read Harry Potter nearly all love it.
Once you actually read the books, it becomes fairly clear that the magic is just there as a gimmick. The author needed a British public school setting, but that's been done to death, so she made one with a slightly different curriculum.
The "nearly" part above... a number of people were bothered, not by the "witchcraft" but by the fact that in the first couple of books, Harry can do no wrong. Rules are bent or overlooked, everything is forgiven or ignored once it's all over, he makes bad decisions and doesn't discover -- via consequences, like the rest of us did -- that they were bad.
The later books definitely change that (people get injured, killed, etc, as a result of Harry's screwups).
Weird. I knew a former Marine who talked about using the shrimp-based bandages for wounds. They've been atound for a while, that's for sure.
Neither was the original speech. I believe you may have figured something out there. Have a cookie.
One of my oldest
- Peter Gutmann, a.s.r.
(It's a cool sig, so if you use it, give proper attribution, eh, ya plagarizing fucks? Gutmann is someone you don't wanna upset.)
Yes, it was real, and yes, that's pretty muvh how it worked. Several lamps being viewed by a camera, and the image data was broken down to use as random numbers. You could even click a button to request a kilobyte or so of random digits.
It was hosted for a while at SGI's "personal pages for employees" server, which was decomissioned after it became obvious that the projects people worked on in their spare time were way cooler than anything SGI was officially offering that year. The Lavarand webpages were moved around a little, but may have vanished by now.
KDE 3.3 has been in Debian unstable for over a week now. Unfortunately, it's been broken and uninstallable from the beginning, without even acknowledgement from the maintainer.
Just because I love Debian doesn't mean they don't also disgust me. :-)
Are there any other KDE-related debs in experimental?
Yes, that's a really cool idea, but that function key had better be bright red, with a little plastic mollyguard over it, locked. And it should take two people standing fifteen feet apart turning a pair of keys at the same time to unlock it.
I mean, Tab and Esc are right next to each other on the keyboard I use, and I occasionally insert tabs when I wanted to go back to command mode in vi. Can't imagine the fun I'd have if I meant to hit ~ and accidentally hit "reboot this machine and install linux immediately" instead.
:-)
No it wasn't. Java was designed for one thing: to make money for Sun Microsystems. Everything else is secondary.
Yes, it's a good language. Not particularly innovative, but it has a nice clean design. It started out with a good-sized standard library, which has now become so huge as to be unlearnable. 8 points out of 10.
But it's also the only programming language in CS history to come with a corporately-chosen marketing slogan ("write once, run [never the same way on any two platforms] everywhere"). That's a bad bad sign, and you seem to have fallen for the hype. You're smarter than that.
No, it's not all hype. Yes, it's a fine language. No, it wasn't designed to be easy to learn.
...in which Dernhelm yanks off his helmet to revreal that "he" is actually Eowyn, who then delivers her not-a-man line and ruins the Witch-King's whole day with a sharp pointy thing.
The setup is even more prominent in the books. The race is referred to as "Men" (capital M) as an all-inclusive term. When the Witch-King laid the smack down on Arnor and rode off, an Elf prophesied that "far off yet is his doom, and not by the hand of man shall he fall."
I believe it's even printed with a small 'm'. Could be wrong.
In any case, everyone standing by heard it to mean that it would be an Elf or Dwarf or Other[tm] who would eventually kill him, when it actually turned out to be a very brave woman and a Hobbit.
(The Hobbit kinda cheated by using a dagger which had been specifically enchanted against the Witch-King, but the movie skips that.)
Absolutely. Unfortunately, as most predator-prey models will tell you, neither population ever goes to zero unless something catastrophic happens. And in this case, catastrophe is precisely what we want to happen to the prey.
(If they'd simply implement my proposed scheme of a bullet to the head of every spammer, no mercy, no appeal, it'd be easy. But noooo, "spammers are human beings no matter how useless and harmful they are," waaaaah.)
Um. "Discrete" is the word you want. Spammers are anything but discreet. :-)
Thanks, guys, appreciate the info.